


Put Your Foot on the Land and See

by arboreal_overlords



Series: The Wooden Archives [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast), Wooden Overcoats (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, I can’t believe I didn’t call this ‘Yacht Rock’, M/M, Post-Season 3 Tim Stoker is on a kayaking trip from hell, Spoilers through the end of TMA Season 3, Tim joins the Spooky Boat Fam, set in the six months between TMA seasons 3 and 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22206616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboreal_overlords/pseuds/arboreal_overlords
Summary: The S.S. Piffling was anchored off the coast of Brighton when they spotted him: a lone man bobbing in a garishly painted kayak that was clearly not meant for open water. He was holding an axe instead of a paddle and was bleeding rather profusely from a head wound.“Oh, hi!” The man said, waving at them with the axe. “I think I might be dead?”Or: Timothy Stoker confronts his future. Eric Chapman confronts his past. Everyone else is just trying to get by between potential apocalypses.
Relationships: Eric Chapman/Rudyard Funn, Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker
Series: The Wooden Archives [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1590118
Comments: 24
Kudos: 128





	Put Your Foot on the Land and See

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome welcome to the second installment of a crossover between two niche podcast fandoms that no one asked for. Content warnings for Tim Stoker being an absolute tire fire of a human being, but more specifically for some semi-suicidal ideology and aggressive behavior (but only what is already canon for late Season 3 Tim).
> 
> Also, how is Tim alive? Is he an avatar of, like, the End now? No flipping clue. I expended no mental energy figuring it out. Bonus, the course of the S.S. Piffling makes absolutely no sense. But, to be fair, its Rudyard plotting it, so.

The _S.S. Piffling_ was anchored off the coast of Brighton when they spotted him; a lone man bobbing in a garishly painted kayak that was clearly not meant for open water. He was holding an axe instead of a paddle, and was bleeding rather profusely from a head wound.

“Oh, hi!” The man said, waving at them with the axe. “I think I might be dead?”

“You’re not dead, you’re in Brighton,” Chapman called back.

At this, the man brightened. “Hey! I know you! You’re the hot coffin man! From the Institute!”

“Let’s leave him in the water,” Rudyard said warily.

“Are you the spooky island group?” the man pressed on, undeterred by the blood running down his face. “I think I just blew up a bunch of clowns. Maybe. Possibly also my boss.”

Georgie turned to grab a rope. “We’re helping him.”

“Georgie, no,” Rudyard said faintly.

“I’d actually really appreciate some help!” The man called, his energy appearing less friendly and more manic at closer quarters. “I can’t row well with this axe, and I have no idea how long I’ve been here.”

Georgie threw down a rope tied to a life preserver down to the man’s kayak, and then hoisted him vigorously onto the deck of the yacht. The man flopped on the floor like a particularly fit and bloody fish, gasping for breath. “Thanks,” he said hoarsely.

“No problem. I’m great at hoisting people out of the Channel” Georgie said, stowing the rope back nearly into the chest at the bow of the ship.

Rudyard, meanwhile, was hovering over the man still lying limply on the deck. “Hello?” he said faintly, nudging the body with his foot. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

“Don’t kick him, Rudyard,” Antigone hissed, just as the man grunted. 

“You alright?” Georgie asked. “Antigone, maybe get your kit?”

“I’m a mortician, Georgie, not a medical doctor. I only fix dead people.”

“He did say he thought he might be dead,” Georgie said reasonably, pointing to the man’s gray and inert form on the deck. He groaned in agreement.

“Georgie, in mortuary science, if a client tells you _personally_ that they are dead, that’s not a good sign”

“Yeah, fair.”

“Out of the way!’ Chapman suddenly said, appearing back on the deck with a medical kit. “It turns out that the months I spent interning with Medicine Sans Frontiers might finally come in handy!”

Everyone else on the boat rolled their eyes at each other, including Tim, but his eyes were closed so he didn’t count.

Chapman made some concerning noises about the shallow but wide laceration in the man’s forehead and a shrapnel wound in his shoulder, but it was only a matter of minutes before he was patched up and lying dazed and half-unconscious on the deck while the rest of the SS Piffling stood uncertainly around him.

“I suppose he can’t tell us anything in this state,” Antigone said at last. “Georgie, can you …”

“Yeah,” Georgie said, hoisting the man over her shoulder and carrying him into the berth.

“Chapman, how specifically does this man know you?” Rudyard asked waspishly.

Chapman sighed. “Right. Remember when Madeline and I went up to London briefly so I could talk to the Magnus Institute?”

“I prefer not to.”

Madeline suddenly emerged from Rudyard’s coat pocket, squeaking insistently.

“Yes, I know that we all agreed that it was for the best,” Rudyard snapped in response. “I know! I know! And yet now we have a zombie kayaker following us.”

“He was a research assistant or something at the Institute,” Chapman said. “Rudyard, this was what you wanted to do! Help people who were struggling with the paranormal.”

“He’s not struggling with the paranormal, he’s just struggling with the tide.”

“He was paddling with an axe.”

“So he’s a badly prepared kayaker struggling with the tide,” Rudyard protested. “More importantly, we have a schedule to maintain. We’re supposed to be in Portsmouth by tomorrow.”

“So we’ll just make a new schedule,” Chapman reasoned.

“That defeats the entire point of a schedule!” Rudyard protested. “Look, I have one job on this boat—”

“Ship,” Chapman automatically corrected.

Rudyard glared at him. “As I was saying, I have one job and it's making sure that our course runs smoothly.”

Georgie emerged back from the berth of the yacht. “So, let’s just bring him with us,” she said, shrugging.

“We can’t just bring him with us,” Antigone said urgently. “That’s kidnapping! He needs to go to a hospital!”

“There are hospitals in Portsmouth,” Georgie said sensibly.

“Besides, it’s not kidnapping,” Chapman replied easily. “He knows me! He just said so!”

“That’s not how kidnapping _works_ , Chapman,” Antigone snapped. “Christ, you’ve been spending too much time with Rudyard. I knew I should have objected at your wedding.”

“Hey!” Rudyard said, looking offended.

After several more rounds of bickering on the comparative advantages of turning the unconscious kayaker over to the authorities, the inhabitants of the S.S. Piffling tentatively agreed on continuing on their route with their unorthodox passenger, prioritizing pleasing everyone over technicalities like the British law.

“For the record,” Antigone said furiously, “I will indict every member of this boat before spending a minute in prison. Aesthetics aside, I would miss several key writing deadlines.”

“—Ship” Chapman muttered rebelliously.

**X x X x X x**

When Tim woke up, he found himself in a spartan bedroom that clearly wasn’t his. There was a threadbare quilt on the bed made of a patchwork of corduroy and flannel. The weirdly curving walls were lined with cedarwood, with small, round windows, and a few watercolor prints of dogs. On the bedside table, a mouse sat serenely, scribbling on a post-it note with what looked like a tiny pen. This was either the weirdest version of heaven that Tim could imagine, or he was still trapped in a surprisingly benign version of the Unknowing.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he said hoarsely.

The mouse started squeaking shrilly.

“Um, sorry,” Tim said on reflex. “What the fuck?” he whispered more quietly.

“Yes, I’m coming Madeline,” a short, dark-haired man said brusquely, shouldering his way into the room. “Ah, you’re awake, are you,” he said with slight disapproval.

“Yes?” Tim said. “Why does that mouse have a pen?” The mouse squeaked at him.

“She said that you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened on this boat in weeks, and she wants to use you for her Sunday column,” the man translated.

Tim had a lot of questions lined up, and several more expletives that he would feel the better for shouting, but then three more people crowded their way into the already-small room. One of them Tim recognized as the hot white guy that had made a statement at the Institute months ago. He had apparently sauntered away from a paranormal encounter in a helicopter, and Jon hated him, so he was naturally one of Tim’s personal heroes.

“Rudyard,” the skinny goth-looking one growled, “what have you said to him?”

“You’ve been unconscious for a while,” the Institute guy said to him earnestly. “Mostly dehydration and possible head trauma. How do you feel?”

Tim wasn’t sure how to respond to that. There was still a strong possibility that this was some sort of paranormal hallucination.

“Was I _kayaking_?” He asked finally.

“Yeah,” the muscular redhead said sympathetically, as if confirming that Tim had gotten up to some embarrassing behavior while drunk. “Not well.” The goth girl elbowed her surreptitiously.

“You seemed to recognize me?” The guy continued. “I’m Eric Chapman, I was at the Institute— gosh, it must have been over a year ago now.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “I remember you. Jon was coughing dust for like two days afterward.”

“I really do feel bad about that.”

“Don’t be, he’s an asshole,” Tim said, trying to sit up and then immediately thinking the better of it. “He was an asshole,” he amended. “Ugh, god”

“Well, since Chapman doesn’t see fit to introduce the rest of us, I’m Rudyard Funn,” the shorter dark-haired man said. “I’m Chapman’s former nemesis.”

“He’s also my husband,” Chapman interjected calmly.

“Yes, fair. This is my sister Antigone Funn—” the goth looking one made an anxious noise— “and of course you’ve already had your life saved by Georgie Crusoe.”

“You’re welcome,” Georgie drawled, leaning against the doorframe.

“So what’s been happening since?” Chapman asked intently. “At the Institute?”

Tim looked exhausted. “Okay, I’m going to try to summarize as much as possible. I was also in Malaysia for a bit, before I got really sick and realized that I would die if I didn’t go back to the work.” Everyone around him looked a little alarmed at this, but Tim ignored them. “I think that’s actually gone now, since I’m pretty sure I really did die in the circus ritual or whatever it was, even if my death didn’t stick. So, since you were here, we were attacked by a worm woman who filled the Institute with, well worms. That’s how I got these,” he said, gesturing to the small circular scars running down the side of his face. “Sasha killed them with the CO2 canister system while Jon, Martin and I were down in the archive tunnels, where Martin found a dead body. It turned out to be Gertrude, our old boss that Jon replaced. That’s when it got really weird.”

“Oh, _that’s_ when it got weird,” Georgie said. Antigone hushed her. Tim sighed and let his head fall back, narrating the rest with his eyes closed and a pinched expression.

“So Jon, my boss, turned into a paranoid maniac who followed us all home and lurked outside our flats.”

“Yeah, that checks out,” Chapman said evenly.

“I tried to leave the Institute, only to find out about the distance thing, and had to come back from Malaysia and continue working in a job I hate for a literal evil boss. Oh, yeah, the head of the Institute, Elias, turned out to have shot Gertrude and pipe murdered some other guy. He doesn’t really matter right now. Then I found out that my friend Sasha had been killed by some spooky table in Artifact storage and replaced by … some _thing_ that erased all our memories of her and tried to eat us. Jon came back after he was cleared of murder— I’ll explain that later— with these theories about an evil circus that was trying to cause the end of the world. By a funny coincidence, this is the same evil circus that killed my brother. Anyway, we were going to interrupt this ritual with a bunch of C4.”

“Hey, great minds,” Georgie said, and Tim made a grimace that was something close to a smile.

“I guess. We got in there and they scrambled our minds, until Jon used his weird archivist powers to get me to see what was happening. I was holding the detonator to the C4, so I pushed it. Easiest decision I ever made. And then, you know . . . this.”

After he finished, the room was quiet.

“Do you want us to bring you back?” Antigone finally asked quietly. “To London, I mean.”

“No,” Tim said forcefully. “I’m not going back there. I’m _not_.”

“Okay,” Chapman said soothingly. “Do you have friends or family that we could call?”

“Well, my best friend had her identity stolen by a _table_ ,” Tim snapped. There was a long silence before he spoke again. “No, Not really. Jon’s dead. So are Basira and Daisy, probably. Melanie and Martin are still around but --- I can’t talk to them right now. I don’t think they’d want to see me. God, definitely not Martin. My parents died a while back, and . . . . I haven’t really kept in touch with any of my old friends from uni or publishing. I think I have some family on my Dad’s side in the Philippines, but I don’t know any of them that well.”

There wasn’t a lot to stay to that list.

**X x X x X x**

For the few first days, it was kind of like sharing quarters with a depressed tiger, albeit one that could moonlight as an underwear model. Tim would either float quietly in the background, speaking in a low monotone to anyone who asked him a direct question, or fly into a towering rage without warning. 

About half a week after Tim was taken aboard, they made harbor in Portsmouth. “Come on,” Georgie ordered. “We’re going to go have fun.”

“Why? Are you going to make me to talk about my feelings?” Tim challenged.

“No,” Georgie said .”How would that be at all fun for me?”

“Fair.”

The two trudged into town, Tim making a face in the window at his disheveled appearance. He had tried to cobble together clothes from all four inhabitants of the S.S. Piffling, which resulted in him wearing a hodgepodge combination of Georgie’s snapback, Chapman’s jumper, a pair of Rudyard’s extremely battered shoes, and a pair of sweatpants that Antigone had definitely stolen long ago from a corpse.

“Could I get some clothes?” Tim asked awkwardly. “I mean . . I don’t know where you guys get your money from and I don’t exactly have my wallet on me—”

“Oh, yeah,” Georgie said casually, pulling a wad of cash out of her pocket and handing it to Tim. “Get whatever you like. Chapman’s rich, no idea how or why. I think he inherited it? Every time we ask he just pulls that ‘long time ago’ crap.”

“You guys are so fucking weird,” Tim said earnestly. “I’ll be back in like a half-hour. Or _not at all,_ because you just gave me, like, five hundred pounds.”

Georgie shrugged. “My problem’s solved either way then, isn’t it?”

“Weird,” Tim repeated, pointing at her, and walking backward into an AllSaints.

“Get clothes that you can punch things in,” Georgie called after him.

“That’s everything!” Tim called back, grinning for the first time and making finger guns at her as he disappeared into the store.

An hour later, Georgie emerged from a nearby pub to fund Tim waiting with a bunch of bags. “I wasn’t kidding about the punching thing,” she said. “Did you get gym clothes?”

“Yep,” Tim said. “I threw out the stuff I was wearing. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Nah, that hat actually belonged to my ex. You’re doing me a favor.”

“Another chapter in the mystery of Georgie Crusoe!” Tim said in his weird announcer voice.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Georgie pointed out, “where you say something that you think is banter but it just comes out weird and aggressive.”

“Sorry,” Tim said. Even that came out sounding weirdly aggressive, and he winced.

The two ended up in a small, dark boxing gym tucked in behind a shopping mall. A man who is five inches shorter than Tim and looks like he could destroy him in about ten seconds shows him how to wrap his hands, and Georgie throws him a pair of puffy boxing gloves, the coloring faded around the top curve from use.

“My gran got me into doing this after my parents died and I moved in with her,” Georgie said finally. “Whenever I’d feel scared, or sad, I used to just get really mad instead. This helps.”

“Plus, you get really good at hitting things.”

“Yeah, kind of,” Georgie said, circling her punching bag. “Losing your temper doesn’t make you a really good boxer. You have to learn how to breathe through it.”

Tim nodded. “What happened to your grandma?”

“Oh she’s fine, she’s still back home dating half of Piffling Vale. I send her postcards. It’s not all tragic backstory.”

“Well, good for you,”Tim said bitterly, swinging into a particularly hard undercut.

As it turned out, after two hours of boxing and three lukewarm Fosters at the nearby pub, Tim did indeed want to have a conversation that was at least feelings-adjacent. “I just— I don’t know what to _do_ now,” he said, making a fist against the bar. “I got vengeance for Danny. Not to brag, but I technically saved the world. I can’t just go back into publishing after blowing up an evil circus. Imean, doubt they’d have me back, my CV is has a four-year gap where I was a paranormal researcher and I think I’m legally dead. I’m sure as hell not going back to the Institute.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” Georgie said. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you have a career in competitive kayaking.”

Tim snorted begrudgingly.

“Dunno what you’re doing in the long run,” Georgie said. “If we play our cards right in the. next twelve hours, though, I think we can get drunk and convince Rudyard to tell the story of how he got arrested for throwing a dummy replica of Chapman off a cliff.”

Tim blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”

**X x X x X x**

Antigone was sitting in the berth of the yacht, tapping her pen against a legal pad, when Tim walked in. This room was originally designed as a billiards room, lined with dark wood and covered by a dark green carpet that looked like the felt of a gaming tabletop. There were a few small bolthole windows at the top of the right wall that offered a lookout into the water, which was usually a dim, dusky blue that gave little light into the rest of the room. For all its eldritch menace, Antigone missed her mortuary. Unlike Chapman, she had walked away from The Buried with her affinity for small, dark spaces intact. Being underwater was almost as good as being underground.

“What are you doing down here?” Tim asked abruptly.

“Writing. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“I know,” Tim said, his tone still slightly belligerent. “Georgie said that if I bothered you she would throw me overboard.”

“Yes, well, only if I asked her to, I suppose,” Antigone said absently, not looking up from her legal pad.

“So you call the shots around here, huh?” Tim barreled on. “I thought it was maybe Chapman or even Georgie, but they all follow your lead.”

“‘Follow’ is a strong word. Did you really come all the way down here to talk about our boat’s leadership structure?”

“I haven’t had great experiences with small group leadership so far, so yeah, maybe— ”

“—Tim,” Antigone snapped. “I am trying to recreate a series of erotic letters between forbidden lovers in Vichy France. Unless you can help me with that, get out of my writing room.”

Tim paused, and when he spoke again his tone was entirely different. “Are you writing a _romance_ novel?”

“No, I just enjoy historic epistolary form as a fun mind puzzle. _Yes_ , I’m writing a romance novel.”

“Oh. Cool. I don’t know anything about that.” Tim paused. “I once seduced a Belgian postal worker, though. If that’s helpful?”

“Really?” Antigone asked, suddenly sounding intrigued. “Why would you do that?”

“Well, I had to follow up on a statement by this guy named Hercule O’Malley who got eaten by his begonias. Jon thought that maybe his letters to his aunt in Antwerp would be helpful, so I popped up there over the weekend—”

Half an hour later, Georgie meandered down to the writing room to ask Antigone about lunch to find Tim dramatically re-enacting a passionate lovers quarrel between himself and someone named Victor while Antigone nodded and hummed

“What’s going on here?” Georgie asked, leaning against the doorway.

“Tim is providing key source material for my novel,” Antigone said, scribbling furiously on her legal pad. “But how did he _look_ when you told him that you’d never meet again?”

After that, Antigone popped up at odd hours to fling seemingly random and extremely personal questions at Tim about his past dalliances. Tim took this in stride, narrating his exploits with relish and not a little exaggerated detail. Tim and Chapman were hovering over the HVAC system one surprisingly hot September afternoon when Antigone appeared without warning right behind them, softly clicking a pen.

“Tim,” she said quietly.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Chapman said, banging his head on the top of a pipe.

“Hi Antigone,” Tim said cheerfully. Tim had once explained that after working with an omniscient fear god, Antigone’s ability to appear out of nowhere was comparatively relaxing.

“Can I ask you some questions ?” Antigone asked, her pen hovering intently over her legal pad. “It’s about, ah ... I’m writing this ... this... “

Tim leaned over to look at her notes. “Bondage? Sure.” He cracked his knuckles through his work gloves. “I am a trove of knowledge,” he said generously, enjoying Chapman’s immediate flush. “Now, the thing people get wrong about buying rope is—”

“And that’s my cue to leave,” Chapman announced, pivoting away from the HVAC system on his heel.

None of them would have originally pegged Tim as the gossipy matchmaking type, but discussing people’s personal lives served as one of the few conversational topics that took off some of his hard-eyed edge.

“So when did you and Rudyard first get together?” Tim asked Chapman one afternoon while they were managing the yacht’s controls, pulling away from Bournemouth harbor. “Were you really, like, nemeses?”

Chapman laughed. “I mean, he would say yes. I really just wanted to be his friend in the beginning, and then I eventually reached the stage where I fantasized about strangling him.”

“Kinky,” Tim said, just for the unimpressed look Chapman shot him over the controls. “No but seriously, how did that whole thing happen?”

Chapman sighed, but (as Tim had surmised) would never pass up the opportunity to talk about either his feelings or his marriage. “I used to have a hard time connecting with anyone,” he said finally.

Tim laughed. “No way! You?”

“I mean I could get people to _like_ me,” Chapman acknowledged wryly, “but not really connect with me. I moved around a lot in my twenties, so I also never really kept a set group of friends. I was never alone, but I was . . . . pretty much always alone, if that makes sense.”

Tim nodded. “Hey, we had a fear entity for that and everything, back at the Institute,” he joked.

Chapman smiled tightly. “Right. Well, I moved to Piffling Vale because I needed a change. What I was doing before wasn’t working for me. And— well, you’ve listened to my statement I guess. Claustrophobic horror sequence and all. But even before that, Rudyard was the only person I’d met who was just— I mean he hated me, but he also _saw_ me, you know?” Chapman cleared his throat, and Tim was instantly reminded of people’s discomfort after Jon had extracted a statement from them. He wondered if, even after his posthumous professional divorce from the Beholding or the Eye or whatever, he still held faint traces of compulsion. The thought was unsettling.

“Anyway, plus, you know,nothing creates an instant bond like being stuck in a coffin together every night for a few weeks,” Chapman added, his tone lighter. “There should be an app for that!”

Tim nodded. “Okay, if I ask you something will you promise not to get weird about it? You don’t have to answer!”

“Sure,” Chapman said casually, focusing on the steering wheel.

“Did you guys fuck in the coffin?”

Chapman immediately turned bright red. “What? _No_! Rudyard doesn’t— I mean—we were in a coffin! We were buried alive! In what scenario—”

“Hey, no judgment here,” Tim said, holding up his hands and suppressing a grin. “I’ve just been curious ever since hearing your statement. Sasha and I had a bet going, actually.”

“Get a new hobby, Tim.”

“It was this or blowing up circuses. I’m making healthy choices,” Tim said loftily.

**X x X x X x**

It took three months before Chapman brought up Tim’s brother, which was pretty restrained for him. Chapman was so clearly dying to have a conversation about _feelings_ from the get-go, before Georgie pointed at him sternly and said: “do not do the Mr. Sunshine thing on him, Eric.”

Tim was getting marginally better; he made fewer jokes-that-weren’t-really-jokes about dying, and he was able to talk about Sasha and the Institute without turning sour and defensive. Helping Antigone with her novels and occasionally working with Chapman to maintain the yacht seemed to keep him busy, and Chapman didn’t mind all of Tim’s eye-rolling when Chapman referenced his varied background in mechanical engineering.

The problem was Rudyard, unsurprisingly. No one else on the S.S. Piffling could get Tim’s back up quite as quickly, and usually entirely by accident.

If Tim was in the mood for self-reflection, he probably would have realized that this was because Rudyard reminded him of Jon; they were both socially oblivious, rash, and somewhat self-centered. Hell, even Rudyard’s _voice_ sounded a little like Jon’s. Jon was almost certainly dead by a bomb that Tim had detonated. While Tim didn’t feel guilty about that at all, the fact was that Rudyard kept bringing up all of Tim’s latent anger and frustration at the deceased boss that Tim had refused to forgive with his dying breath. Had Tim continued down this path of self-reflection, he probably would have also acknowledged that Rudyard, annoying as he was, didn’t really deserve to be the brunt of Tim’s Jon-related anger. Also, unlike Jon, Rudyard had an intensely protective husband.

However, Tim was not in the mood for self-reflection, and therein lay the problem.

It all came to a head one morning in the kitchen when Rudyard was narrating his findings of other people’s encounters with The Buried.“Some American named Jackson Ellis keeps writing me about a hole in the Pacific Northwest,” he grumbled, phrasing ‘American’ with the inflection others usually used for ‘serial killer.’ “Tim, did you ever come across an Ellis? Should I write him back? Horrible grammar. Enjoys the odd comma splice.” Tim was sitting across the room, staring vacantly into his tea.

“Tim,” Rudyard said insistently, his voice lilting into an irritating sing-song. “Tim. Tim! Tim. Tim! Tim, can you hear me?”

“Oh fuck _off_ ,” Tim finally exploded, “you have no idea what you’re dealing with. You can’t just play around with those things!”

“Hey,” Chapman snapped. “Don’t talk to him like that.”

“I don’t need you to defend my honor, Chapman,” Rudyard said testily.

“You really, really do, but that’s not the point right now,” Chapman responded. “Tim, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you do not get to use Rudyard as your scapegoat.”

“What’s going on with me is that he’s a pompous idiot who is going to get us all killed!”

Rudyard, who had the tact and social grace of a rabid buffalo, rolled his eyes. “Hyperbole aside, I thought that would have been an incentive for you.”

Tim swung around and grabbed the front of Rudyard’s shirt, Chapman rocketed out of his chair, and about ninety seconds later Georgie walked in on Tim and Chapman screaming at each other, clearly moments from starting a fistfight. Tim was almost literally frothing at the mouth, furiously spitting dirt out between words. Rudyard looked over at her, panicked.

“What the hell is going on here?” Georgie asked, striding onto the deck and pushing the two men apart. “Chapman, stop making him cough dirt, that’s cheating,” she said, handing Chapman off to a chastised-looking Rudyard, who patted him on the head like he was calming an angry horse. “Tim, go. Walk it off.”

“Yeah, okay,” Tim said hoarsely, wheeling around in the other direction and bolting out the door and onto the deck.

Georgie turned and stared at Chapman, who was looking at her defensively over the top of Rudyard’s head as he brushed residual pieces of dirt off Chapman’s face.

“Well?” Georgie said. “Are you handling this or am I?”

Chapman sighed. “I’ve got it,” he said tiredly, walking towards the kitchen door. “This is probably overdue.”

Chapman found Tim broodily looking out into the water at the stern of the ship. “We’re going to talk about it,” Chapman said firmly, striding towards him. “I don’t care if you want to or not. You don’t ever take a swing at him like that again.”

“I wasn’t actually going to hit him,” Tim said defensively. He stopped and paled. “Jesus, that sounds really bad, doesn’t it.”

“Yes,” Chapman said pointedly.

“I just, I don’t think I’m going to be able to just go back to any kind of life,” Tim said in an angry rush. “Other people who are just walking around not worrying about— fucking _fear entities_ or murder holes in the ground or whether or not they’re responsible for the paranormal murder of their brother. It’s just mundane shit, like jobs and bad dates and 410ks. It makes me furious.” He paused for a moment, breathing heavily. “How do you just stop hating other people all the time?”

Chapman shrugged. “Other people are all there is,” he said softly.

The two stood for a while, wreathed in the early morning fog of the Channel in late autumn. It was cold for October, and the fog felt almost slimy and damp, twisting over the water like a discarded knitting project.

Chapman stared out into it, his face wrinkled in apparent consternation. “I had a brother too,” he said finally, drumming his hands on the deck bar. “He died a few years ago.”

“How’d he die?” Tim asked bluntly.

“Congenital heart failure.”

“So he wasn’t skinned alive by clowns, then.”

Chapman coughed. “No— no he was not. Jesus, is that what happened?”

“Yep,” Tim said defiantly, popping the ‘p’. “I was there.”

“God, I’m sorry, Tim. That’s . . . that’s awful.”

“Well, I blew them up. So, I guess you could say I got the last laugh.”

“Yeah, you did,” Chapman said tentatively. “Does that . . . help?”

“It did. It does,” Tim said. “That’s probably not healthy. It wasn’t particularly _heroic_ of me. But it helps.” He paused, seeming to will the ugly, sneering smile that had become a bad habit off his face.”Was he older or younger?” he asked. “Your brother.”

“He was a year older,” Chapman said. “Evan always thought I was a bit too full of myself.”

Tim used his five-minute-old resolution of more self-reflection to quash down on his instinctive response of _Evan was absolutely on the money there_. “Did you not get on?” He asked instead.

“I don’t get on with any of my family,” Chapman said frankly. “We haven’t spoken in years.”

“Ah,” Tim said understandingly. “Is it the married-to-a-man thing?”

Chapman laughed abruptly. “No, it’s not because I’m bisexual.”

Tim didn’t press on with that line of questioning. “Does Rudyard know about them?”

“No,” Chapman said quickly. “It’s . . . complicated. It was all a long time ago.”

“Yikes,” Tim said meaningfully. “Look, I know I’m not, like, an expert of healthy relationships, but that’s definitely the kind of thing you should share with people before you marry them.”

“I know,” Chapman said, sighing. “I’m working on it.”

“But I won’t tell anyone,” Tim hastened to respond. “Also I’ll apologize to Rudyard, that was way out of line. I think— he actually kind of reminds me a lot of Jon.”

Chapman grimaced. “Please never put that comparison in my mind ever again.”

“Oh god, I keep forgetting that you’ve _met_ Jon,” Tim said with dawning humor. “He really hated you.”

“Ah. I genuinely couldn’t tell if he loathed me or if he was just… _like that_ all the time,” Chapman confessed.

“Por que no los dos?” Tim said, grinning.

**X x X x X**

In the end, it was Antigone’s books that set everything into motion. Once she had finished the Vichy France one and Tim had gently pried the manuscript out of her hands to prevent her from endless anxious revisions, he had decided to take his first solo jaunt to a publishing house in Manchester where a few of his old colleagues still worked. Three days later, he returned with a new wardrobe and a better outlook on his future.

“You know, they were pretty surprised to see me,” Tim said thoughtfully, “So someone must have gotten around to publishing an obituary. I’m not sure how I feel about being legally dead.”

“That’s honestly an improvement,” Georgie said.

“Right?” Tim said cheerfully.

Three days later, they were playing Go Fish while docked in the Isle of Wight when a tall blonde man in an exquisitely tailored suit just strolled onto the deck. “Good evening,” he said smugly. “Georgie is definitely in possession of a Jack, if you’re thinking of making a strategic attack, Antigone.”

“Oh, you have got to be fucking _kidding_ me,” Tim seethed, reaching behind him and picking up his axe that had apparently been stowed under his flimsy deck chair the entire time. “Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?”

“Ah, Tim” Elias said fondly.“Ever the catalyst. Yes, I was biding my time in jail. I was supposed to be biding my time for much longer, but imagine my surprise when my tragically dead former employee was suddenly making waves in Manchester. I had never thought to _look_ for you after the Unknowing, is the thing. One doesn’t scour for a corpse, after all. And now, here you are, sailing in a circle around the Channel, surprisingly untethered from the Institute—”

“—Wait. Didn’t I beat you up in a bar in Sao Paulo once?” Georgie interrupted, snapping her fingers at him. “Barker said you were some sort of spooky psychopath.”

Elias actually flushed. “Miss Crusoe. There won’t be any need for that, I come in peace. I actually just wanted to check in on Tim, now that he has so intriguingly returned to life. Although—” he stopped, suddenly, staring at Chapman, who was regarding him with surprise. “Eric? What on earth are you doing here?”

Chapman frowned. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

Elias grinned, a wide Cheshire smile that made him look like a shark with great hair. “Oh, this is really too good. You wouldn’t have remembered me, you were quite young and I looked a bit different. I was briefly married to your uncle, of course. You should give him a call, Peter’s been looking all over for you.”

Chapman froze.

“Oh, Chapman, do you have an uncle?” Rudyard asked, oblivious to the sudden tension in the room.

“Not the time, Rudyard,” Antione said anxiously.

Elias tilted his head and looked between the two men, still smiling. Chapman edged slightly in front of Rudyard, his face white and rigid.

“Eric Chapman,” Elias said slowly, as if testing the words in his mouth. “Is that what you’re calling yourself now? You certainly did a marvelous job covering your tracks. They all expected Evan to be the dropout of the family, but I think your leaving rather left a sting. I’d never paid any attention to Piffling Vale, especially after Gertrude foiled the ritual. It’s all a bit … grubby, isn’t it? Imagine a Lukas touched by The Buried. Peter’s going to be _furious_.”

“Wait,” Tim said, turning toward Chapman. “You’re a Lukas? The Institute donor Lukases?” He paused. “Actually, that explains a lot. You’re right, your family sucks.”

“I assume that the family doesn’t know about your marriage,” Elias continued, ignoring Tim. “Especially after what happened to Evan's fiancé, that poor girl. She came in to give a statement about what happened up at the estate. Do you want to see the funeral? I know you couldn’t make it.” He gestured towards Chapman’s head.

“No,” Chapman said firmly, even as he winced and brought a hand to his forehead.

“Now, look here,” Rudyard said, looking suddenly furious. “I don’t know who you think you are, but around here we conduct funerals, we don’t beam them into people's heads. I don’t know how you know Chapman— or whatever he decides that he wants to call himself— and I don’t particularly care. Get the _hell_ off my boat.”

“Ship,” Chapman said quietly, reaching out to hold his hand.

“Yeah, what he said,” Tim added, gesturing with his axe at Elias. “And keep in mind that I’ve already seen all the worst moments of my life in person, so there’s not a lot stopping me from chopping off at least two of your limbs before I succumb to the trauma or whatever.”

Elias held up his hands. “There’s certainly no need for that kind of hamfisted escalation, Tim. I only came to welcome you back to the land of the living. What a motley crew you do make. I’ll have to think about this. Now, if you excuse me,” he said, backing down the ship’s ramp without breaking eye contact, “I have to go make a bet with an old friend.”

The boardwalk of the dock was well-illuminated and stretched in a line towards the shore, so there was no explanation for the way that Elias just vanished. Tim made a growling sound deep in his throat and lowered his axe.

“I’m guessing that you all probably have a lot of questions,” Chapman said in a sad monotone. “I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. I know I . . . I kept a lot of things out. You deserved to know.”

Rudyard sighed fondly, “Yes, Chapman, you’re an endless mystery of a subterfuge wrapped in an enigma. We knew this.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d think that we mind,” Antigone added.

“Great that you kept hold of your evil trust fund, though,” Tim said. “Top marks for that.”

“Do you know any cool tricks besides the dirt thing?” Georgie asked. “You better not have been holding out on us.”

Eric stared at them, looking overwhelmed. “I used to be able to disappear when I was a kid,” he said a little unevenly. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Rudyard said with uncharacteristic gentleness, putting an arm around his shoulders. “It’s really more Antigone’s thing.”

Chapman made a soft humming sound and just kind of collapsed onto Rudyard’s shoulder, folding over the shorter man and burying his face in his neck. After a moment Antigone and Georgie circled around them, and Madeline crawled out of Rudyard’s shirt pocket and nestled inside Chapman’s shirt collar.

“I’m not really a group hug person,” said Tim, who was very much a group hug person.

“Too bad,” Georgie said, beckoning him in with one arm. “ Come on, one won’t kill you.”

Tim delicately folded himself in between Antigone and Georgie. “Later,” he said, his voice slightly muffled by Antigone’s hair, “I’m going to need to hear the story of you beating up Elias in a bar in Brazil.”

“It was an Applebees, actually,” Georgie said generously. Tim sighed in quiet ecstasy.

After a few minutes, Georgie’s mobile rang, breaking the silence.

“That’s weird,” she said, extracting herself from the tangle of limbs and reaching into her pocket. “Nobody else really calls me on this. I just use it for candy crush.” She picked it up. “Georgie Crusoe.” Georgie’s eyebrows rose. “Barker? Surprised to hear from you so soon. What’s up? Woah, slow down.”

She looked over to Tim suddenly in alarm. “Wait, you’re at the Magnus Institute? What are you doing there? ... Yeah, I know what that is, long story... You were attacked by _what_?”

She mouthed the word ‘ _flesh_ ’ confusedly at Tim, who groaned and put his head in his hands.

“Give me the phone,” he said, waving at Georgie.

“Hold on, one second. Barker, I’ve got someone here who you might want to talk to. Be nice. “

Tim grabbed the phone from Georgie’s outstretched hand and looked down at it like a live tarantula he was being asked to eat.

“Damn it,” he said bitterly and put the phone to his ear. “Hi, this is Tim. Yes, that Tim. Can you put Martin on?”

He made a face into the air, not making eye contact with any of the group. “What do you mean, he’s not around? He’s alive isn’t he? .... Then where the hell else could he possibly be?”

Tim listened for a few more moments before sighing. “Okay, okay. What about Melanie, is she there? .... she fought _what_ with a knife? Jesus, is she okay?”

There was a brief moment before the tone and pitch of the voice on the other end of the phone suddenly changed. Tim held the phone slightly away from his ear and winced. They could faintly hear “you stupid idiot!” and “Five months! I’m going to kill you myself!”

“Oh, he said weakly. “Hi, Basira.”

“Tim,” Antigone said wryly, “as interesting as this dinner theater of a phone conversation is, could you please put the phone on speaker so the rest of us can participate in it.”

“Yes, I would like to hear you get shouted at some more,” Rudyard said happily.

Tim made a face at him and pressed a button on the side of the phone, placing it gingerly at the end of the table.

“— I mean, are you still human?” Basira was saying. “You’re not allied with the Unknowing or anything, are you?”

Tim shrugged. “I’m not made of spiders or plastic or anything, and tape recorders don’t magically turn on when I’m around, so survey says yes.”

“I never actually thought of that,” Georgie said. “Bummer that you didn’t come away with any cool skills.” 

“Thanks, I’ll pass,” Tim said wryly. “I think I really did die though, Basira.”

“So did Jon, but we’re somehow stuck with him anyway.”

Tim made a complicated expression. “Jon’s alive? How is that possible?”

“Who knows?” Basira responded, sighing. “It’s Jon. He’s in a coma, so he’s being the usual amount of help.”

Tim snorted, then looked a little guilty.

“At least Elias is in jail,” Basra continued, “but the guy who took over from him, Peter Lukas, is a creep. I don’t know what Martin’s doing with him, but it’s nothing good.”

Chapman was looking vaguely ill. Tim took a deep breath.“Yeah, I’ve good some bad news and some good news for you about Elias and Peter Lukas.”

“Great,” Basira said, sounding exhausted. “Look, Barker called because we need all the help we can get. She said Crusoe seemed to know what she was doing when they met in Brazil.”

“Yeah,” Georgie said cheerfully. “Turns out I’m great at wrangling eldritch horrors.”

“Well, that makes one of us. Tim, I know that you hated being here, but we need some backup.”

Tim rubbed at his eyes. “Let me talk to these guys,” he said haltingly. “We’ll think it over.”

“It’s good to have you back, Tim,” Basira said, her stern tone lightening slightly.

“I want it on record that I would rather be literally anywhere else,” Tim said. “But I’m glad that you’re okay, Basira.”

“I’ll take it,” Basira responded. “See you in a few days.” The line went dead.

“Tim,” Chapman said, frowning. “Your friend Martin— the one who’s working with my uncle. What is he like?”

“Martin?” Tim frowned. “About yay high? Nice? A little naive? Basically a teddy bear cursed to live in human form?”

Chapman’s frown deepened. “If Peter’s interested in him, that’s not good.”

There’s a quick pause. Tim sighed. “Yeah, okay, let’s go. But I’m _not_ going to work back at the Institute. I don’t care what apocalypse is fucking nigh.”

Georgie grinned. “That’s the spirit. We should have a catchphrase: ‘the apocalypse is nigh, but at least there are no clowns.”

“We get the C4 in the ritual in the ground on time,” Rudyard said hesitantly, and Tim held up his hand for a rare high-five.

About three weeks later, Jon Simms would wake up from his coma and find that the Institute was somewhat more crowded than usual. He would find out that yes, he was correct in living in fear that Georgie Crusoe and Tim Stoker would become best friends, especially armed with the knowledge that said Georgie Crusoe had made out with his ex-girlfriend in an unspecified Applebees. However, he would also find that having three individuals touched by The Buried knocking around was particularly helpful when one had a cursed coffin in one’s office. Moreover, as soporific as Peter Lukas’ malevolence was, it was tempered by having an extremely angry nephew loudly applying his various talents around the Institute without permission.

Most importantly, when Jon woke up from his coma, there was an axe hanging on the wall of his hospital room, framed in a shadow box and surrounded by several dried flowers that Antigone had helped prepare. “From the metaphorical desk of Timothy J. Stoker,” was written across the front glass in Sharpie. “To Jon: wake up so we can stop doing all of your work for you. Smash glass in case of emergency.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please stay tuned for the sequel about Georgie Crusoe and Georgie Barker beating up Elias and Peter in an Applebees in Brazil and then making out, because its WHAT THEY DESERVE. 
> 
> Please also stay tuned after that for a Chapman POV fic about being raised in the Lukas family and his relationship with Rudyard, because that is the headcanon hill I will die on 
> 
> Come yell with me about the two podcasts on tumblr at @arborealoverlords


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